Licensed for Distribution Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce Published 25 August 2020 - ID G00450834 - 46 min read By Mike Lowndes, Jason Daigler, and 3 more The COVID-19 pandemic has propelled the digital commerce market to new heights by forcing organizations into adoption and vendors into new approaches and pricing models. We evaluate the viability of 15 vendors to help application leaders supporting digital commerce make informed evaluations. Strategic Planning Assumptions By 2022, organizations using multiple go-to-market approaches for digital commerce will outperform noncommerce organizations by 30 percentage points in sales growth. By 2023, prices for B2C digital commerce platforms will be 30% less than in 2019, due to feature commoditization and “headless” implementations. By 2023, organizations that have operated enterprise marketplaces for more than one year will see at least a 10% increase in digital revenue. By 2024, 10% of digital commerce organizations will use packaged business capabilities to construct their application experiences. Market Definition/Description Gartner’s view of the digital commerce market continues to focus on transformational technologies and technological approaches for delivering impactful solutions to clients. Gartner defines a digital commerce platform as the core technology enabling customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service experience. The platform provides information necessary for customers to make buying decisions. It uses rules and data to present fully priced orders for payment. The platform must have out-of-the-box capability or the APIs to support a self-service, interactive commerce experience that includes: ■ Storefront ■ Product catalog navigation ■ Product pages 1/27 ■ Shopping cart ■ Check-out ■ Customer account The commerce platform must support, out of the box, the ability to search for products, add products to a cart, and fully price an order inclusive of product-, customer- and order-level discounts or promotions. The commerce platform must support interoperability with customer, product, content, and order functionality and data via APIs. Magic Quadrant Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce Source: Gartner (August 2020) Vendor Strengths and Cautions Adobe (Magento) 2/27 Adobe (Magento) is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a Leader. Its commerce product, Magento Commerce, offers a single-tenant commerce platform, as well as multitenant distributed order management and commerce analytics. Operations are globally diversified, with the majority of Magento’s customers being midsize businesses in a range of industry sectors and geographies. Digital commerce leaders in midsize B2C and B2B organizations seeking a robust commerce solution that can be deeply customized should consider Magento. Digital commerce leaders in large enterprises should monitor Adobe Commerce Cloud, a bundled offering that combines Adobe Experience Manager with Magento, as it improves Magento’s ability to scale and deepens the integrations with Adobe’s industry-leading marketing and personalization products. Strengths ■ Global span: Magento had one of the largest increases in new customer numbers, relative to other vendors evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. Magento has grown its market share through its extensive global solution integration partner network, its dominance of the midmarket, and its expansive reference customer base for both B2B and B2C digital commerce models. ■ Commerce scope: Clients often choose Magento because of its expansive feature list and robust app marketplace. Magento Commerce includes a native web content management (WCM) module (Page Builder) with its commerce platform, and provides additional solutions for order management, shipping and analytics. ■ Adobe ecosystem: Under Adobe’s ownership, Magento is beginning to benefit from Adobe’s ecosystem of capabilities, especially in complex B2C commerce scenarios. Adobe Experience Manager, a market-leading digital experience platform (DXP), has been bundled with the managed services offering of Magento to form Adobe Commerce Cloud. Gartner expects Adobe to continue to build its momentum by competing for digital commerce market share with a growing suite of capabilities. Cautions ■ Cloud SaaS: Magento Commerce is not a cloud-native application and lacks autoscaling at the time of publication of this Magic Quadrant. Magento is addressing agility requirements by expanding the application’s GraphQL API coverage to enable headless commerce. However, the core single-tenant commerce application retains a monolithic architecture that can be challenging to upgrade in a cost-effective manner when extensive customizations have been made to the core codebase. ■ Enterprise-scale gross merchandise value (GMV): Magento’s roadmap highlights improvements to application performance and scalability as part of its move into the Adobe enterprise market. Organizations with sustained order volumes and high SKU counts should evaluate Magento’s ability to scale. ■ Focus on Adobe: Magento Commerce did not receive a major upgrade in 2019. Magento’s focus was directed toward the Adobe Commerce Cloud launch, which included rolling out a 3/27 managed services model for enterprise customers. Its roadmap is similarly focused on Adobe Commerce Cloud investments. BigCommerce BigCommerce is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was a Niche Player. It offers an eponymous multitenant SaaS commerce solution on Google Cloud Platform. Traditionally focused on SMB and midmarket organizations with under $50 million in commerce GMV, BigCommerce has recently attracted customers with over $100 million in GMV, and thus shown improved ability to attract more complex customers. Its operations are substantially based in the U.S., as are most of its customers. Digital commerce leaders in small or midsize B2C and B2B organizations seeking a cloud-native multitenant commerce solution that can be extended via APIs should consider BigCommerce. Strengths ■ Growth: BigCommerce had strong revenue growth in 2019, compared with other vendors of similar size, and this has propelled it from the Niche Players quadrant into the Challengers quadrant. Although historically focused on the SMB market, in the past year BigCommerce has onboarded more customers in the midmarket and enterprise-scale categories, thus demonstrating an ability to handle increased complexity, including headless commerce. Additionally, BigCommerce has grown its customer base beyond North America, by expanding its referenceable customers in Latin America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. ■ Interoperability: BigCommerce has a foundational set of APIs to enable interoperability of its multitenant commerce platform. Additionally, BigCommerce is unique among multitenant cloud commerce vendors in that it does not throttle API calls to its platform. This improves BigCommerce’s competitive advantage over Shopify, which is often shortlisted with BigCommerce. ■ Customer focus: Gartner Peer Insights reviewers and users of Gartner’s client inquiry service have given BigCommerce comparatively high ratings for responsiveness, service and support, and pricing flexibility. BigCommerce’s strategy to attract more midmarket customers has built an internal culture that is focused on customer acquisition, responsive to the communications of existing and prospective customers, and willing to work on negotiated pricing to win business. Cautions ■ Environment tooling: Third-party tools are required for multiple-environment support, such as for development and staging — a requirement of most midmarket customers. Out of the box, BigCommerce’s solution comes with a simple page preview only prior to live deployment, an approach more typically suited to small-company processes. ■ Network of system integration (SI) partners: BigCommerce has experienced SI partners in North America, but few elsewhere. It has one of the shortest SI partner lists of vendors of 4/27 comparable size. ■ Span of B2B features: BigCommerce’s B2B capability is improving, but still shows gaps when compared with B2B-focused commerce platforms. For instance, B2B customer hierarchy and approval workflow management capabilities are lacking. Additionally, the ability to operate multiple stores with subcatalogs is not available out-of-the-box, which may limit the platform’s utility for some B2B commerce use cases. commercetools Commercetools is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant, due to growth in its customer numbers, revenue and geographical span; in the last iteration of this research it was a Visionary. Its eponymous headless commerce solution is available as multitenant SaaS on Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is aimed at large, complex organizations — a typical customer has over $100 million in GMV annually. Its operations are substantially based in Europe, and customers are mostly in Europe and North America, although a regional data center in Australia opened in March 2020. In October 2019, commercetools was spun off as a private firm from Germany’s REWE, raising $145 million in funding from private equity firm Insight Partners. Digital commerce leaders should consider commercetools if they have deep expertise in integration technology (or the means to hire that expertise from a digitally mature solution integration partner) and need multichannel digital commerce capability. Strengths ■ Cloud: Commercetools’ solution is cloud-native.